Guns
Gun Control: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/sell-massacre-nra-playbook-revealed-190325111828105.html How to sell a massacre: NRA's playbook revealed Three-year undercover sting reveals how US' National Rifle Association handles public opinion after deadly gun attacks. by Peter Charley 19 hours ago https://archive.fo/XChCw - I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. (FiveThirtyEight researcher) https://overland.org.au/2012/08/when-the-burning-moment-breaks-gun-control-and-rage-massacres/ "Thus, contrary to what most commentators imply, the modern movement in support of ‘gun rights’ began not with the far Right but with the New Left. The key moment came in 1967 when the Black Panthers invaded the California legislature, rifles in hand. At that protest, Bobby Seale argued:" "For blacks, the ownership of guns possessed an obvious symbolic importance. An armed black man or woman was someone who rejected the passivity of the slave or the servant, someone who not only asserted their constitutional rights but showed a willingness to defend them. Conservatives understood that message, too: that’s why, in the sixties, even the NRA supported calls gun control. The wave of laws passed in the late sixties to limit gun ownership was a direct response to the new black militancy. As one critic said, the legislation was intended, ‘not to control guns but to control blacks’." "What those figures show is that interactions with the police are already responsible for a substantial proportion of gun deaths. Entirely predictably, these deaths are racialised – ‘If you are a young man, a person of colour, and live in a poor urban area, you are far more likely to become a victim of police gunfire than if you are none of those things.’ Once more, that’s the context in which the calls for stricter gun laws are made. The very proliferation of weaponry means that guns can be found throughout poor communities in the inner cities. Passing new anti-firearm laws and then enforcing them means, almost by definition, unleashing militarised police forces upon inner city populations, under circumstances where the police have a demonstrated track record of shooting suspects dead." "That is, calls to ‘get the guns off the street’ fail to acknowledge that the process matters as much as the aim. There’s a crucial difference between militarised police sending their tanks and drones into urban areas, and community groups within those areas organising themselves to drive out criminals, encouraging individuals not to carry weapons, picketing gun shops and gun fairs and other attempts to push firearms, and thus providing a collective security so that guns no longer seem necessary. Grassroots activism of that type might also take up any number of other demands for palliatives to ease the violence, such as better mental health facilities or a stronger social security net for those under financial stress. Most fundamentally, such efforts could begin to reknit the social connections severed by the neoliberal turn, and by so doing provide the sense of meaning and purpose missing in an intensely atomised society." gunpowder:" Gunpowder Facebook post 26/2/2018 (Black Consciousness) "One technological reason why Africans weren't able to defend themselves from being taken into slavery During the Han Dynasty, circa 142 AD, Wei Boyang became the first to documentation of the existence of gunpowder. During the Jin dynasty, circa 300 AD, Scientist Ge Hong was the first to attest the ingredients of gunpowder and nature of the explosion. Ingredients: - Fifteen parts of potassium nitrate or saltpeter - Three parts of charcoal - Two parts of sulphur During the rule of the T’ang Dynasty, circa 700 AD, Chinese people of the far east actually began to use gunpowder. During celebrations the Emperors of the T’ang Dynasty utilized gunpowder as pyrotechnic display that we would today recognize as fireworks. Ancient Chinese inventors, circa 904 AD, discovered gunpowder could be used as a powerful weapon At first, ancient Chinese armies put gunpowder inside rockets. Shortly after the Chinese armies shot rockets using gunpowder, they placed miniature stone cannonballs inside bamboo tubes and fired the cannonballs outward by igniting gunpowder at one end. Circa 1100s AD, people of the he Seljuk Empire was a medieval Turko-Persian Sunni Muslim empire, originating from the Qiniq branch of Oghuz Turks got hold of the Chinese emperors secret weapon. Around the same period the Romans learned how to use military used gunpowder. Around 1216 AD, English monk Roger Bacon documented gunpowder discriptiviely as a weapon he thought as being imported from a foreign place. New found knowledge of gunpowder quickly spread throughout Europe. Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama found a sea route to India in 1497-1498. Da Gama and his fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope in December 1497, and named the nearby coast Natal, after the Portuguese word for Christmas. (The South African province of KwaZulu-Natal retains this name today.) According to historians, "Many southern Africans have indigenous and pre-colonial words for ‘gun’. Scholars have generally been reluctant to investigate or explain this fact." Western history books make a lot out of Vasco da Gama, the 15th and 16th century Portuguese explorer, being the first international trader to open up East Africa but what is not made so much noise about, despite increasing evidence, is that Zheng He, a eunuch administrator and diplomat during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in Imperial China, arrived on the East African coast several decades earlier than Vasco da Gama. Zheng He’s maritime travels took place from 1405 to 1433 and it is documented that in 1418 he led a vast fleet of no less than 62 ships ferrying 37,000 soldiers across the Indian Ocean (“Western Ocean”) who were certainly possessing gunpowder and small cylindrical cannons. Depsite timeline evidence of the introduction of gunpowder to Southerern Africa, gunpowder never reached West Africa prior to the transatlantic slave trade. West African's lacked of knowledge of the existence of gunpowder and firearms played a major factor in why Europeans were able to acquire West Africans as slaves. Imagine if our ancestors had gunpowder; nevertheless, guns, Europeans wouldn't have been able to acquire them for transatlantic slave trade." - Facebook post 26/2/2018 (Black Consciousness) Category:War Category:Technology Category:Death Category:Imperialism